Democracy Now! Blog

As news comes that the IRS will award whistleblower Brad Birkenfeld $104 million—the largest individual federal payout in U.S. history for exposing the biggest tax evasion scheme in U.S. history—we will speak with one of his attorneys, Stephen Kohn, executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center. Click to see our past coverage on Democracy Now! and to read columns by co-host Juan Gonzalez on how the former UBS banker went to prison after he revealed the bank had helped thousands of Americans evade taxes.

Read an excerpt from the newly published book, "500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars," Kurt Eichenwald, who will be a guest Wednesday, Sept. 12, on Democracy Now! He reports that newly disclosed documents from before the 9/11 attacks provide further evidence the Bush administration ignored repeated warnings about Osama bin Laden’s plans to attack the United States. Through over six hundred hours of interviews and thousands of documents, he reveals details about detainee treatment and rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and more.

In this Democracy Now! web exclusive, you can look back through a decade of our coverage of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, the voices of peace and dissent as President George W. Bush led the nation into war, the attack on civil liberties and more.

In this Democracy Now! web exclusive, you can look back through a decade of our coverage of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath, the voices of peace and dissent as President George W. Bush led the nation into war, the attack on civil liberties and more.

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
Four hardy souls from rural Illinois joined tens of thousands of people undeterred by threats of Hurricane Isaac during this week’s Republican National Convention. They weren’t among the almost 2,400 delegates to the convention, though. These four were about to join a much larger group: the more than 2.4 million people in the past decade whose U.S. jobs have been shipped to China. In their case, the company laying them off and sending their jobs overseas is Bain Capital, co-founded by the Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.

Democracy Now! will expand to a daily two-hour broadcast during the 2012 Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Amy Goodman and the Democracy Now! crew will travel to Tampa Bay and Charlotte to report from the streets, to the suites, to the convention floor. Tune in on Monday, August 27 from 8 to 10 a.m. ET for day one of our special coverage, "Breaking With Convention: War, Peace & the Presidency."

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
People remember 1929 as the year of the stock-market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, the global economic disaster which remains the only one in history that dwarfs the one in which we now find ourselves. It was also the year Martin Luther King Jr. was born, who wouldn’t live to see 40 years.

Read "Spies in the Hills," Chapter 1 of the new book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to Power, by Seth Rosenfeld. Decades in the making, the book reveals that the FBI tried to disrupt the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, helping to ignite an era of protest and to launch Ronal Reagan’s political career. Rosenfeld will be a guest Thursday on Democracy Now! His book also contains explosive allegations that Richard Masato Aoki, the man who gave the Black Panther Party some of its first firearms and weapons training, was an undercover FBI informer, according to a former bureau agent and an FBI report.

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan is considered by many a champion of small government. For women, though, the federal government that Paul Ryan envisions is big, intrusive and controlling. Paul Ryan would ban all abortions, with no exceptions, even in cases of rape, incest or the health of the mother. In other words, the mother could die as a result of complications from the pregnancy.

In one of his first public events since being held under house arrest, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange appeared in London in June 2011 for a conversation with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, moderated by Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. They discussed the impact of WikiLeaks on world politics, the release of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and Cablegate — the largest trove of classified U.S. government records in history. [includes rush transcript]

With an average of 32 people killed by guns in this country every day—the equivalent of five Wisconsin massacres per day—both major parties refuse to deal with gun control. It’s the consensus, not the gridlock, that’s the problem.

In the aftermath of the Sikh Temple shooting in Wisconsin, we revisit a 2011 report by Democracy Now’s Jaisal Noor about how Sikh Americans have been targets of violence and harassment. Tune in Monday at 8am ET for an interview with Noor, and more coverage of the mass attack.

In part two of our interview with the investigative duo James Steele and Don Barlett, they talk about the media’s failure to hold Wall Street or politicians accountable for financial crimes and mismanagement — topics covered in their new book, "The Betrayal of the American Dream." They also discuss attacks on Social Security, and campaign finance reform. [includes rush transcript]

In a Democracy Now! exclusive, we speak with Viridiana Martinez, an undocumented DREAM activist who is being detained in the Broward Transitional Center in Pompano Beach, Florida. [includes rush transcript]

In part two of our interview with Matt Taibbi, he describes recent Wall Street scandals — including a decade-long Wall Street scandal that drained money from every county and state in the United States — and notes not a single bank executive has faced individual consequences. He also explains how Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s former firm, Bain Capital, and others have used private equity to raise money to conduct corporate raids. [includes rush transcript]

Alexander Cockburn, the longtime journalist, columnist and publisher of the progressive website of news and analysis Counterpunch, has died at the age of 71. Cockburn was a prolific writer who authored columns over the years for the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal and The Nation magazine. Cockburn appeared on Democracy Now! several times including this 2003 appearance shortly after the publication of his book "The Politics of Anti-Semitism."

A stunning indictment has been handed down in Cincinnati, focusing attention again on police killings of people of color. This is a start for accountability and justice. Cleveland should pay attention. As the thousand people gathered there last weekend said clearly, “Black Lives Matter.”

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